Excerpt from the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson

     “And that’s the last thing you remember?” He watched her scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that was their only plate.
     She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. “I’m sorry, Case, honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an’ it was…” She hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few seconds with pain or its memory. “I just needed the money. To get home, I guess, or… hell,” she said, “you wouldn’t hardly talk to me.”
     “There’s no cigarettes?”
     “Goddam, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What’s wrong with you?” She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.
     “But the food was here? It was already here?”
     “I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.”
     “Okay. Sure. It’s seamless.”
     She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. “Well, damn you anyway, Case,” she managed, finally, “I was doin’ just fine her by myself.”
     He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway, scraping his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. “Okay,” he said to the night, “I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes better wash up.” His own laughter startled him. “A case of beer wouldn’t hurt, while you’re at it.” He turned and re-entered the bunker.
     She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. “Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, ‘cept she looked like more money than you had….” She glanced back at him. “I’m real sorry I stole your RAM.”
     “Never mind,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything. So you just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?”
     “Tony,” she said. “I’d been seein’ him, kinda. He had a habit an’ we… anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember wonderin’ how you—”
     “There wasn’t any graphics in there,” he interrepted.
     “Sure was. I just couldn’t figure how you’d have all those pictures of when I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that….”
     “Tony see it?”
     “I don’t remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise, those birds all yellin’ so lonely. Scared ’cause I didn’t have a shot on me, nothing’, an’ I knew I’d be gettin’ sick…. An’ I walked an’ walked, ’til it was dark, an’ found this place, an’ next day the food washed in, all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.” She slid her stick into the embers and left it there. “Never did get sick,” she said, as embers crawled. “Missed cigarettes more. How ’bout you, Case? You still wired?” Firelight dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of Wizard’s Castle and Tank War Europa.
     “No,” he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.
     The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting of against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger’s memory, the drive held.
     She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.
     Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he remembered what she had said.
     “He told you I was coming,” he said.
     But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put her hand over his, and muttered something out of dream.

Excerpt from the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson

     Case slapped the simstim switch…
     …and crashed through tangled metal and the smell of dust, the heels of his hands skidding as they struck slick paper. Something behind him collapsed noisily.
     “C’mon,” said the Finn, “ease up a little.”
     Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines, the girls shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix, a wistful galaxy of sweet white teeth. He lay there until his heart had slowed, breathing the smell of old magazines.
     “Wintermute,” he said.
     “Yeah,” said the Finn, somewhere behind him, “you got it.”
     “Fuck off.” Case sat up, rubbing his wrists.
     “Come on,” said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove in the wall of junk. “This way’s better for you, man.” He took his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. “You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush? You aren’t missing anything, back there. An hour here’ll only take you a couple seconds.”
     “You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming on like people I know?” He stood, swatting pale dust from the front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back at the dusty shop windows, the closed door to the street. “What’s out there? New York? Or does it just stop?”
     “Well,” said the Finn, “it’s like that tree, you know? Falls in the woods but maybe there’s nobody to hear it.” He showed Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette. “You can go for a walk, you wanna. It’s all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in.”
     “I don’t have this good a memory,” Case said, looking around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but couldn’t.
     “Everybody does,” the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel, “but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they’re any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn’s place in lower Manhattan, you’d see a difference, but maybe not as much as you’d think. Memory’s holographic, for you.” The Finn tugged at one of his small ears. “I’m different.”
     “How do you mean, holographic?” The word made him think of Riviera.
     “The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you’ve worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you’ve never done anything about it. People, I mean.” The Finn stepped forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case. “Maybe if you had, I wouldn’t be happening.”
     “What’s that supposed to mean?”
     The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across the shoulders, and didn’t quite settle back into position. “I’m trying to help you, Case.”
     “Why?”
     “Because I need you.” The large yellow teeth appeared again. “And because you need me.”
     “Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?” He grimaced. “Wintermute, I mean.”
     “Minds aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind.” He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. “See this? Part of my DNA, sort of….” He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. “You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I’m here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you’ll have finally managed the real thing.”
     “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
     “That’s ‘you’ in the collective. Your species.”
     “You killed those Turings.”
     The Finn shrugged. “Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?” And his right hand held the charred wasps’ nest from Case’s dream, reek of fuel in the closeness of the darks shop. Case stumbled back against a wall of junk. “Yeah. That was me. Did it with the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it’s important?”
     Case shook his head.
     “Because”—and the nest, somehow, was gone—“it’s the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be. The human equivalent. Straylight’s like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. I figure it’ll make you feel better.”
     “Feel better?”
     “To know what they’re like. You were starting to hate my guts for a while there. That’s good. But hate them instead. Same difference.”
     “Listen,” Case said, stepping forward, “they never did shit to me. You, it’s different….” But he couldn’t feel the anger.
     “So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species. Demon, she said I was.” The Finn grinned. “It doesn’t much matter. You gotta hate somebody before this is over.” He turned and headed for the back of the shop. “Well, come on, I’ll show you a little bit of Straylight while I got you here.” He lifted the corner of the blanket. White light poured out. “Shit, man, don’t just stand there.”
     Case followed, rubbing his face.
     “Okay,” said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.
     They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals.
     “Jesus,” Case said, tumbling.
     “This is the front entrance,” the Finn said, his tweed flapping. “If this weren’t a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This’ll all be a little low on detail, though, because you don’t have the memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly….”
     Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral.
     “Hold on,” the Finnsaid, “I’ll fast-forward us.”
     The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong movement, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.
     “Here,” the Finn said. “This is it.”
     They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.
     “The Villa Straylight,” said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, “is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves….”
     “Essay of 3Jane’s,” the Finn said, producing his Partagas. “Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course.”
     “The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull’s inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan’s corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man’s hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.”
     That was her you saw in the restaurant,” the Finn said.
     “By the standards of the archipelago,” the head continued, “ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull.”
     “Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
     “The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.
     “At the Villa’s silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonné, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool….”
     The head fell silent.
     “Well?” Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him.
     “That’s all she wrote,” the Finn said. “Didn’t finish it. Just a kid then. This thing’s a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That’s the catch. Doesn’t mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride that Chinese virus, if this thing does’t hear the magic word.”
     “So what’s the word?”
     “I don’t know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don’t know, because I can’t know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn’t know. It’s hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.”
     “What happens then?”
     “I don’t exist, after that. I cease.”
     “Okay by me,” Case said.
     “Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting to go.”
     “What’s that mean?”
     But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.

Excerpt from the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson

     “That level’s the cubicles,” Bruce said, after asking Case to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed back into the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell exhaust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks. “You be long?”
     “No saying. But you’ll wait.”
     “We’ll wait, yeah.” He scratched his bare chest. “That last part of the address, I think that’s a cubicle. Number forty-three.”
     “You expected, Lupus?” Cath craned froward over Bruce’s shoulder and peered up. The drive had dried her hair.
     “Not really,” case said. “That’s a problem?”
     “Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend’s cubicle. If they let you in, fine. If they don’t wanna see you…” She shrugged.
     Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron. Six turns and he’d reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a Yeheyuan, looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half residents of the islands.
     “Downstairs,” he said to a passing waiter, “I want to go downstairs.” He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured toward the rear of the club.
     He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing fragments of half a dozen European languages as he passed.
     “I want a cubicle,” he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a terminal on her lap. “Lower level.” He handed her his chip.
     “Gender preference?” She passed the chip across a glass plate on the face of the terminal.
     “Female,” he said automatically.
     “Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn’t satisfactory. You can access our special services display beforehand, if you like.” She smiled. She returned his chip.
     An elevator slid open behind her.
     The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the elevator and chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A hush like the halls of an expensive clinic.
     He found his cubicle. He’d been looking for Molly’s; now, confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor set directly beneath the number plate.
     Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.
     The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut-out. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door.
     The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated. The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were soundproof. It was pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb the sound.
     He placed his chip against the black plate.
     The bolts clicked.
     She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he’d actually gotten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes….
     “Jesus Christ,” she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. “You’re an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?” She leaned over him.
     “Chip,” he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading from his chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the cubicle.
     “You bribe the help, upstairs?”
     He shook his head and fell across the bed.
     “Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count.”
     He clutched his stomach.
     “You kicked me,” he managed.
     “Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I’m meditating, right?” She sat beside him. “And getting a briefing.” She pointed at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed. “Wintermute’s telling me about Straylight.”
     “Where’s the meat puppet?”
     “There isn’t any. That’s the most expensive special service of all.” She stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a loose dark shirt. “The run’s tomorrow, Wintermute says.”
     “What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?”
     “‘Cause, if I’d stayed, I might have killed Riviera.”
     “Why?”
     “What he did to me. The show.”
     “I don’t get it.”
     “This cost a lot,” she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. “Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you’ll have the reflexes to go with the gear…. You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ’cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for….” She cracked her knuckles. “Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren’t compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it…. But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.” She smiled. “Then it started getting strange.” She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. “The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time.” She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. “So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that’s the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.”
     “They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?”
     “I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain…. You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know. And they didn’t tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets.”
     She seemed to speak from a distance. “And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I’d tell myself that at least some of them were just dreams, but by then I’d started to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele going for me. Nothing’s too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise.” She shook her head. “That prick was charging eight times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn’t know.”
     “So what was he charging for?”
     “Bad dreams. Real ones. One night… one night, I’d just come back from Chiba.” She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall. “Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer….” She dug her fingers deep in the foam. “Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren’t alone. She was all…” She tugged at the temperfoam. “Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ‘What’s wrong. What’s wrong?’ ‘Cause we weren’t finished yet….”
     She began to shake.
     “So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?” The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. “The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while.”
     Case stared at her.
     “So Riviera hit a nerve last night,” she said. “I guess it wants me to hate him real bad, so I’ll be psyched up to go in there after him.”
     “After him?”
     “He’s already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda…”
     Case remembered the face he’d seen. “You gonna kill him?”
     She smiled. Cold. “He’s going to die, yeah. Soon.”
     “I had a visit too,” he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded.
     “Maybe it wants you to hate something too.”
     “Maybe I hate it.”
     “Maybe you hate yourself, Case.”